Sunday, 29 January 2017

Where I am...

I am a broken woman.

This is what four hours of retail therapy in Milton Keynes does for you. Not only were my feet killing me yesterday, my poor ears had also narrowly escaped being chewed off by daughter number two. This ability to talk non stop is one she inherits from my side of the family, as the husband often tells me (when he can get a word in edgeways), so I shouldn't be surprised really. I had gone there with a short list of two items, one of which I managed to buy, but I managed to supplement my meagre planned purchase with various other bits and pieces, none of which were necessary, but hey, since when did 'necessity' become a requirement when buying something pretty?

As I predicted in yesterday's blog, sure enough we both had bags coming back to the car, and yes, I paid, as all good mums do when they visit their offspring. But it was so lovely to see her, and catch up on everything (even the stuff I don't really understand as befitting a woman of 53).

As I have got older, my internal compass has gone the way of everything else on my body, and stopped working as efficiently, so I had used the satnav on the way up to MK. These are instruments of torture as far as I am concerned, as the talking lady can only be heard if I switch my music off, or, and this is perfect, if someone phones me. Music is really important to me, as you'll guess from all the song titles which head up my blogs, so to drive in silence is painful. I usually start off talking to myself, which then turns into talking at other drivers who have the misfortune to cross my path. Eventually, I start telling myself to shut up, and so it goes on.

Equally frustrating is having a conversation with son number two while the silly cow is shouting at me to take the next left. I gave up in the end, and decided to just glance down every now again to check I was going the right way, whilst singing along to Nirvana at the top of my voice. This explains why I took a left instead of a right, thus adding another seven minutes to my journey.

Coming back home, I stuck the damned woman on again, and this time she brought me back an entirely different way. I'm not saying that I was in the back of beyond, but between MK and home (an hour and a half) I didn't pass a single petrol station. Luckily I didn't need fuel, but I had promised myself a coffee on the way back. By the time I did see a petrol station, I was six minutes from home, and the coffee moment had passed.

The husband had been busy while I had been either in the shops or on the roads. I had left him with instructions to take Percy back to the vet to check his paw. He had made the decision to take Reg, who was still milking the whole 'My paw is hurting just as much as his' drama, to make sure that he didn't really have something wrong. Apparently, the vet had humoured the husband when he had suggested that Reg had come out in sympathy with his paw, and had nodded wisely, agreeing that although it wasn't something he'd heard of before, it was possible.